Jess lanai

Imagine you’re given a puppy.

But the puppy comes with a catch.

You can either take that puppy into your arms admire how cute it is then put it on the ground.

And kick it.

Kick it all the way down the street listening to it yelp until it runs off into someone else’s arms.

Or you can take the puppy into your arms, give it a cuddle. Take it home. Get a little attached to it. But in six months you have to kill that puppy.

This is my friend zone analogy.

As a man you might ask why you’re being compared to a puppy and the only choices are to kick you or kill you.

Because the game starts pretty much within half a second of meeting you. I know you want to sleep with me and I know I don’t want to sleep with you.

So you’re going to feel the pain and death of being friend zoned. And I’m going to feel like I kicked a cute little puppy down the street.

I’ve never friend zoned a man and then changed my mind later. I know some women that have. I have on some rare occasions been tempted to change my mind. But never have. Because.

I’ve never developed enough attraction. I adored the man perhaps. Perhaps even did have some attraction but it wasn’t enough.

Or even, had no attraction at all but over time some attraction developed it just still wasn’t ever enough.

I’ve killed a lot of puppies.

Men might wonder what exactly it is women get out of friend zoning them. I think I’ve heard men say we want the emotional support or we want attention.

I think we as woman friend zone men for the same reason men sex zone women. We have a need that men provide and we get it fulfilled thinking it’s just friendship, it’s not that big of a deal. Isn’t it nice having a friend? Why do you need to sleep with me anyhow?

And what is it men provide women you might ask? It’s difficult to describe. For me it’s sanity, safety, stability. I can honestly say it’s hard to function without good male energy around me.

I become a nightmare version of myself. A vile and nasty being. But if I have some good male friends or a boyfriend, or as I used to have, my dad. (He died) I stabilize.

You might ask what is it that makes me or any woman so sure she doesn’t want to sleep with a man? Why can’t I or she just try it?

I think about that a lot and I imagine it’s very similar to the things that make a man know he only wants to sleep with a woman but could never date her.

I used to think attraction was complex. That it was a magical and mysterious entity. That what I was attracted to was ineffable.

But I’ve paid attention over the years. Especially when I’m forced to friend zone a man I really like that I know really likes me. It’s not easy to do you know.

Be aware that a man genuinely adores you and have to turn him down and run back out into the dangerous wild lands of being single.

But I’ve never questioned it. Attraction is king. Some woman do disregard attraction.

I cannot.

Lack of attraction is a thing. It’s not an illusion invented by shallow minds. It’s not the conditioning of the world around us.

It’s an ancient system that allows itself to be updated. Which is the first fundamental rule of attraction.

Number one: the story

Every desire functions on a story. And what is a story? A story is the way your body translates emotions to your cognitive mind.

You have an experience you get a feeling and then your mind starts to create a little pattern of association and projection of the future.

I’ve noticed it’s the number one ingredient in attraction every time for me.

The development of the story.

A man looks me right in the eyes then looks away. He was a little cute I’m a little intrigued. But no big deal.

I see him laughing with his friends, he must be a fun guy. I’m a bit more interested now.

He’s into death metal. I don’t even like death metal but it’s not what I expected, I thought he’d like country. He’s more interesting now because he’s not in a predictable box.

He took the blame so one of his friends didn’t get in trouble, he’s actually a good friend for real. He’s not just fun.

All these little things add up into a story. And yes, it is a story we are telling ourselves not necessarily facts.

We have to develop our own discernment for the stories we are telling ourselves to get as close to the truth as we can.

But the story is needed for attraction.

I want to swap for a moment. Switch roles. Go into the sex zone men put women in.

All women have been put in the sex zone and if there are any women reading this I might lose my head for what I’m about to say.

But men need a story too.

You need to feel certain things and then have them translated back to your cognitive mind into a story about why you want to date a woman.

You can’t make yourself want to date a woman anymore than I can make myself want to sleep with a man.

This is the battle we are in with each other. It’s a part of life and it’s a part of the story. It’s a part of the development of discernment.

I have what you need you have what I need and we often try to steal it from each other or get it free of charge.

When people get rejected, whether it’s a man being friend zoned or a woman being sex zoned, they aren’t usually worried they were rejected on a false story. They are worried they were rejected on a true story.

So what I’ve noticed my body, that ancient part of the attraction system is reading and not being interested in, is people trying to cover up the true story.

You are not responsible for the stories people tell themselves about you.

But you do have to do your best to help people see the real story and most people don’t know their real story.

Insecurities, failures, your own unique toxic tendencies. People like complexity but lots of men that get friend zoned try so hard for that one note.

I’m a good guy that works hard. Great.

What else? Are you fun? What do you hate? What would you destroy if you could? What do you envy? What petty thing would make you capable of murder?

You’ve got to connect with that dark part of yourself because it has as much valuable information to the story as the good parts do.

Number two: trust

People really never understand what trust actually is. It’s not this moral oh you’re a good person, you do the right thing, thing.

Trust is brutal and primitive and so incredibly transactional.

You trust a person who is very very useful and can benefit you. Period.

There are three elements to trust that I’ve noticed. Especially when it comes to attraction.

Element number one: how big is your gap?

How far apart is the way you see yourself from the way other people see you?

Do you think you’re great at singing? But do you suck?

Do you think you’re being helpful? When you’re actually getting in the way?

These are tough questions to ask because you actually have to acknowledge how you are being received in real time. But it is a main ingredient in attraction. Because it’s a main ingredient in trust.

You can’t trust a person that can’t see reality because they are useless.

Element number two: can you recover?

If you are rejected. If you are ridiculed. If you fail. Can you recover?

If something doesn’t work, can you adapt?

This is an extremely useful quality that everyone wants in a partner because it is such a fundamental part of trust.

Element number three: what will you take?

This is the element of trust that I struggled with the most.

Because it’s the part where you have to be vulnerable and take a lot of risk. What you need from a person has a lot to do with how much they trust you.

People want you to need things from them. They want to be useful and have status because of it. They want to have the power and the safety of being essential to their environment.

Somehow, these days, both men and women seem to struggle with needing. Both just want to provide. But if you only provide you won’t get the full trust.

You actually have to give people power over you to an extent to get their full trust. Even in the attraction stage.

You have to be sad when you don’t see them. Realize where they are benefiting you and what you lose if it doesn’t work out.

Number three: pattern interruption

This one is my favorite and it’s something I’ve noticed very recently in what makes me very attracted to people. Or anything really.

People don’t want to get what they want. They want to be safe and to survive and not be in pain so it makes them think they want to get what the want.

But what they actually want is to get the thing they never thought they wanted.

Pattern interruption. The unexpected and surprising things that open up your mind to what you hadn’t ever considered before is an extreme kind of joy and pleasure that humans actively pursue.

In films, in books, in learning. In art. In gossip. In friendships.

We don’t want all of our assumptions and predictions and projections to be correct. We want them to be correct enough that we don’t fall into a fiery pit of suffering or doom, but other than that we like to be wrong and we like to be surprised and to discover new dimensions to ourselves and other people.

You don’t need to be someone’s type and you don’t need to find your type. People think they do because we’re looking for the story.

A way to make associates and choose something because otherwise we got nothing to go on. We don’t know what to do or where to go or where to start or what to think.

So we pursue comfort and familiarity just to get ourselves out the door. But it’s not actually what we want.

We don’t actually know what we really want. We just know we don’t want to utterly fail and die alone.

Guys that get friend zoned a lot often play it too safe by trying to follow the ‘right’ pattern. They try to do the ‘right’ thing.

They try to be what a woman wants.

We don’t want what we want any more than a man wants what he wants.

Men and women are exactly alike in this sense. We are both lost in the wild trying to make sense of our instincts and our drives so we go the right way.

But our instincts are just memories they don’t know the whole story that’s why they give a story to the cognitive mind so it can develop the rest of it.